by A Jewish UCI Graduate Student
Professor Kopstein,
I am writing to you as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and on behalf of a broader collective of comrades who loudly and unequivocally condemn the current genocide in Gaza. My purpose is to explain, in part, why and how your “remembrance” of the Holocaust is as ahistorical and inaccurate as it is violent and offensive. Though I have no expectations, it is my sincere hope that you engage with this letter seriously, genuinely, responsibly and reflexively. The narrative you perpetuate in your letter, “International Holocaust Remembrance Day: The Past is Never Past,” is an old and tired one, yet one with immense consequences. In this campus-wide disseminated piece of propaganda, you enclose the possibilities for the sort of radical transnational solidarities that might truly lead to both Jewish and Palestinian liberation: liberation that cannot and will not come without the end of settler colonial nation-states, and the modern-colonial world that birthed them. Indeed, my core argument is that the violence, ignorance, and ahistorical nature of your so-called “Holocaust remembrance” is part and parcel of the nexus of historical facts, conditions, and processes which prevent Jews, in your words, from recovering from the past. I’ll begin by making some broader contextual points about this argument, before diving into your letter.
There are a number of points I could begin with here, such as the ways “Jewishness” is a modern-colonial invention; such as the reductionist conflation of heterogeneous genealogies of Judaism to white European epistemologies; such as the specificity, the specific ignorance, of white American Jews. I could begin with the numerous myths about Israel generally, and October 7th specifically, that have long been debunked, even by mainstream media. I could begin with your blatant erasure of now publicly-confirmed facts, such as Israel’s admission to killing its own civilians on and following the October 7 attacks. I could begin with the fact that the only people still fooled by Israel’s narratives of victimhood and self-defense are Zionists and their white supremacist allies, as the recent ICJ proceedings have laid bare to a global audience.
But what I’ll begin with briefly, instead, is a fairly simple point that has also been systematically silenced, erased, and manipulated by ideological architects and historical revisionists like yourself:
The Holocaust, like anti-Jewish antisemitism, is a distinctly European problem. Not an Arab problem. Not a Palestinian problem. Not a Hamas problem. Not a Muslim problem. The Holocaust, in other words, must be understood in the context of European colonialism, white supremacy, and what Aimé Césaire termed the boomerang effect: wherein the methods and modes of slaughter, incarceration, exile, torture, rape, medical experimentation, annihilation, and decimation that European colonizers had used on Black, Indigenous and other “Othered” peoples across the world for centuries finally came back, in the 20th century, to “haunt and hunt” Europe. This is quite a simple and fundamental point: one that, fairly obviously, lies at the crux of any genuine attempt to heal, recover, remember and learn from the Holocaust. It is a simple but crucial point that reveals the manipulation of historical fact required to sustain the career you have built by using UCI’s own students as human laboratories to craft the myth that antisemitism is a Muslim invention.
You, Professor Kopstein, are the boomerang.
You are the constant return of a past that is never passed. You are a central cog in the Zionist war machine that takes the historical memory, intergenerational trauma, revolution, wounds and will of millions of Jews—millions of Roma, Sinti, Polish, Soviet, Black, queer and disabled peoples who survived and perished in the Holocaust—and churns them into a barbaric excuse to annihilate Palestinian life. But because you have made repulsively clear that you don’t care about Palestinian life, let me focus instead on the people to whom you claim to have such a deep spiritual, historical, and existential connection. The sloppy, simplistic, and violent analysis you perform in your letter—and in the research on which you have built your career—is emblematic of the reason Jews, in your words, have yet to “recover” from the Holocaust.
You fuel the mythologies of perpetual victimhood that are the bedrock of Israel and all other settler colonial states. You reduce complex and diverse genealogies of Judaism to a singular, linear, and ostensibly inevitable narrative of victimhood and trauma. You erase the tapestries, memories and origin stories of Arab Jews, Jews of color, and anti-Zionist Jews who both Europe and Israel have consigned to the underside of Jewishness. How can Jews “move on”—how can any community take on the collective work of intergenerational healing and accountability—while ideological architects like yourself have devoted their life’s work to cementing Jewish peoples into an impenetrable (a)historical archive of helplessness and suffering?
Professor Kopstein, your work is profoundly antisemitic. By perpetuating and upholding the world that Europe carved out, through genocide, into settler-colonial nation states, you ensure that the past which birthed the Holocaust is never passed. Your letter, and your life’s work, fuel antisemitism through antisemitism. You weaponize and commodify Jewish identity, Jewish spirituality, and Jewish suffering for your personal gain—for social and academic clout. You know nothing about ancestral knowledge. You know nothing about the way memory lives in the bones. You have not let memories and stories and silence become woven into the very core of your being. Because if you had, you would see that you are the boomerang. You would see that you are the imperial machine, Professor Kopstein, and that your propaganda is warfare.
You speak of memory and wounds. You speak of recovery and psychology and spiritual life. You have been emboldened by the UC military regime, and for this reason you feel empowered to circulate, to an entire campus of students, poorly researched myths as if they were profound theological statements.
You have no right to speak on the centrality of the Holocaust to the collective Jewish memory, because you have carved this collective memory into a ghost of itself. You fail to engage with the Holocaust survivors who have devoted their lives after the war, and some of their final days on this earth, to truly ensuring that another Holocaust is not carried out in their name. You willfully ignore and silence the voices, first and foremost of Palestinians, but always also of Holocaust survivors and anti-Zionist Jews who do not fit your white supremacist narrative.
How dare you.
How dare you compare your experiences as an upper-class white man in America—“planning escape routes before you go to sleep”—to the nightmare of the Holocaust. How dare you parallel your experiences as a white man in America to anything that even remotely resembles the terror that became a constant way of life for those oppressed and murdered by the Nazi regime—the very terror that has been a constant way of life and death for Palestinians who have been oppressed and murdered by the Zionist regime since Israel’s inception.
Your ignorance exposes you.
You do not know what it means to be placed outside of history, to be exiled from the category “human,” as Israel has done to the Palestinians since the first Nakba in 1948, as it does now in the second Nakba in 2024, and as the West has done to Indigenous peoples since its brutal inception of the euro-modern world in 1492. You lack the historical analysis, lived experience, and consciousness to comprehend the existential fatigue experienced by Jewish, Sinti, Roma, Black, disabled and queer mothers who carried their children and elders through the death marches in the Holocaust; and for this reason, you cannot comprehend—you have violently chosen to forget—the ways this existential wound is torn anew, six million times over, with every Palestinian mother whose womb is severed with no anesthesia; with every Palestinian infant frozen or starved or crushed to death in their first 24 hours of life; with every Palestinian child who is severed from their own limbs; with every Palestinian father and uncle who has to dig with bare hands through the rubble of his home, chasing the last breaths of his wife, daughter, nephew; with every Palestinian forced to march with no food, no sleep, and no rest for hours and hours away from their homes, and then again away from the hospitals and schools where they were taking refuge, as Israel turns Gaza into dust.
The contortion you perform to place yourself in proximity to suffering is shameful and embarrassing. You did not grow up sitting with the ghosts of your ancestors as you listened to your grandmother recount the ways that genocide unfolds. I know you did not, because if you had, you would know exactly why Jews have been unable to recover. The stories my grandmother has told me of her experiences surviving the Holocaust–and of her loved ones who perished in it–have become woven into the very fiber of my being. These are the stories I have witnessed play out, again and again, over the past 115 days of Israel’s attempts to exterminate the Palestinian people. For the past 115 days, I have felt collective memory awakening in my bones, carving my heart into six million pieces. For the past 115 days, I have listened to the stories of Palestinians and have been haunted—truly haunted—by the semblances they share with my grandmother’s. For the past 115 days, I have borne witness to the ways 1939 and 1948 and 1492 play out, over and over, as Israel turns Gaza into dust.
You, on the other hand, Professor Kopstein, dance on the ashes of bodies burned in ovens. You dance on the mass graves of Palestinians and, every time you do, so too do you dance on the graves of Holocaust survivors.
You have stolen the lessons of the Holocaust and twisted them, broken off their limbs, disemboweled them, and used the remains for your personal agenda. You have shamelessly claimed collective memory and ancestral wisdom as capital: as something that can be extracted, exploited, and used as an end to (genocidal) means. It is you who refuses to learn from the past. You know nothing of the lessons the Holocaust teaches us, because if you did, you would be able to see that we are “always living in 1938” because the Palestinians have been living and dying in 1948 for the past 75 years. When will we move, Professor Kopstein, back to 1947—before the Holocaust was weaponized by antisemitic and atheist war criminals to justify, first, the expulsion of the remaining Jews from Europe and, second and inextricably, the mass displacement and murder of Palestinians? When will we move forward to a past of Jewish-Arab-Palestinian solidarity and coexistence: a past that flourished for centuries before the Zionist regime turned a sacred land into a genocidal settler-colonial state? Before Israel uprooted 750,000 people and more than 800,000 olive trees, and all the collective memories they hold, and replaced them with check-points and wire fences and drones and military tanks?
Israel never made the desert bloom. It only filled the Earth with blood.
Your letter, your life’s work, and your ideological agenda trample on the collective memory of colonized and oppressed peoples throughout the world. Your propaganda, violently masquerading as a victim’s eulogy, re-enlivens regimes of oppression and apartheid across time and space. Your historical amnesia spits on the labor that Black and brown and colonized peoples globally have performed on behalf of Palestinian liberation. You have utterly and profoundly failed to engage with the history of Israel, with the history of Palestine, with the history of antisemitism, and with the history of the Holocaust. Instead, you sadistically romanticize and obsess over stories of Jewish suffering. You pick them up and retell them as if they were yours to retell. While the imperial UC may have emboldened you with the platform, you neither possess nor deserve the right to speak about Holocaust Remembrance. It is you who performs the violent work of forgetting that you claim to condemn. You are the boomerang, Professor Kopstein. You are the imperial machine that ensures, over and over, that the past is not passed.
Rank and File Irvine 
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